Multi-drug strategy could slow pandemic spread

How individual countries deploy their flu drugs may be key to determining the size of any pandemic that emerges from the current H1N1 outbreak. That's the conclusion of a mathematical model of flu transmission by an international team of researchers.

The findings also suggest that countries that stockpile just one of the two commonly used flu drugs may have trouble controlling a major pandemic.

"If you can hold off using your primary drug until the cumulative number of cases reaches a sufficiently high number, you reduce the spread of resistance and the final number of cases," says team member Joseph Wu at the University of Hong Kong.